Blogging is everywhere. Even major enterprises have signed on to the idea that a corporate blog is the way to reach their savvy new client base.

And they're right.

Even <em>slightly</em> tech-savvy audiences are looking for new ways to interact with the world around them; companies' bombarding potential clients with slick-but-impersonal marketing materials is no longer sufficient. To our democratic way of thinking, that's far too one-sided. We want a say in how our vendors do business with us, and we want faces to go with the names. We want to be able to identify with a company with whom we may have business, and be more than just a number.

In a way, it's a logical outgrowth of the technology. For example, phones have become these technical marvels -- we call customer support, and instead of reaching a live human being, we get tied up in an automated telephone system. But providers have figured out that we do still want some kind of human touch, and so the voice on the other end of that automated system now sounds "just like us": friendly, casual and ever so helpful!

But we want more! We still want -- and often still need -- a live human being, because an automated phone system can only do things that are permitted by its programming; it cannot make judgement calls. A human being must still be part of the equation if your needs are anything outside the expected.

A corporate blog, while perhaps not able to solve your customer service needs, does permit a kind of company-client interaction that was until only recently not possible on such a grand scale.

So what do you do? Do you run out and grab a WordPress installation and start pounding away at your keyboard?

Not quite. You still want to present a credible face to your audience, and blogging, like email, presents a number of risks in that arena. It's nearly effortless to publish a blog entry these days, and with that comes the risk of publishing something undesirable -- from a harmless grammatical error to a potentially distastrous revelation of information (there are a number of case studies covering these and all the territory in between), you must still carefully review your blog entries for gaffes minor and major before allowing them to be published.

Add to that the "interactive" part of the equation: blogging allows your audience to talk back! If comments are unmoderated (<em>never</em> a good idea on a corporate blog), you risk receiving equally undesirable responses, from the mildly irrelevant to spam to outright hacks in some cases. Moderating these comments requires some attention. Some of them are really excellent, many are not, but all require that you spend a little time on them before publishing them to your site; publishing a comment that is not credible in its own right detracts from your own credibility. Some of your readers -- maybe even most of them -- won't notice or even care, but those who do will quite likely take their business elsewhere.

Permitting comments can be worthwhile, however: you may receive a very useful bit of feedback from a client that may not ever otherwise contact you. Who knows? It may save you millions, or might help you retain other customers, or...

If you have such a useful suggestion, or any other comments about our site or services, please feel free to comment here, or contact us through this web site. We don't like spam any more than you do. ;)